IN THE days after a magnitude 7।0 earthquake struck Haiti on January 12th, the country’s shock and grief were tempered by the urgent need to save lives। Now that search-and-rescue operations are officially over—with just 132 people plucked from the rubble alive, and estimates of the dead ranging as high as 300,000—Haitians are confronting the devastation wrought on their perennially troubled land।

The past week has seen remarkable progress। Because Haiti’s roads and ports were badly damaged by the quake, little aid arrived in the disaster’s immediate aftermath. Moreover, since the government was almost wiped out—the presidential palace and most main ministries collapsed—there was no one to co-ordinate those relief workers that did arrive.

Now, such systems are returning, and outside help is beginning to make a difference। Port-au-Prince’s single-runway airport is receiving three times as many flights as it did before the quake, and aid supplies are also pouring into the part-repaired main port. The United Nations has begun hiring up to 220,000 Haitians to work on clearing-up and reconstruction. Electricity, fuel and telecommunications services are back. Locals are queuing for hours at reopened money-transfer kiosks to receive much-needed remittances from abroad.

The streets seem calm, and are now largely free of corpses and their stench. Teams of doctors from elite foreign medical schools are tending to the injured, ensuring their wounds do not get infected. A 1,000-bed American hospital ship is floating in the harbour. The care that the poorest Haitians are now receiving is of a higher standard than anything normally available before the disaster. Small pouches of clean drinking water are being widely distributed.The saddest sight is of the many badly wounded, particularly the thousands of amputees, who limp and hop along the capital’s streets. People paralysed from their injuries are still being brought to hospitals. Providing long-term care for these victims will further drain Haiti’s scarce medical resources. Its human-development indicators were among the world’s worst even before the earthquake struck

The most common problem is homelessness। The International Organisation for Migration estimates that 1m people have been displaced, and that 200,000 tents will be needed to house them. Just 10,000 are in the aid pipeline. Even those who get tents will find them inadequate when the hurricane season starts in June. In the tent cities now occupying most of Port-au-Prince’s parks and squares—mostly consisting of tarps hung from washing-lines—throngs wander in search of shelter. More than 200,000 people have simply abandoned the city. Many of those whose homes survived have nevertheless lost their livelihoods. Ageni Pierre-Louis, who used to sell clothes, says her entire $1,000 stock was buried, and she is now making a living by peddling potatoes.

The inadequate distribution of food aid is also causing tension। Walls across the city feature English-language messages like “We need food and water.” President René Préval complained that a few aid NGOs were putting more effort into creating photo-opportunities than co-ordinating their efforts with the government. The UN World Food Programme has so far been able to reach only 450,000 of the 2m people it hopes to feed. Some distributions have been cancelled due to rowdy crowds—Brazilian peacekeepers resorted to using tear-gas to control one mob this week. Relief workers fret about earthquake profiteering, with good reason: in one large tent city, sacks of grains marked “US rice” were on sale. Some locals feel insulted by those trying to help them. Marie Sam Bastien, a mother of five, complains that relief workers throw food at Haitians as if they were dogs.

Efforts to clean up the destruction from the quake have barely begun। Mr Préval says 25,000 commercial buildings are destroyed and 60m cubic metres of rubble needs to be cleared. Only a few wrecked buildings are being excavated—some of them belonging to shop-owners seeking to recover their stock. At the remains of the five-storey Caribbean Market, mechanical diggers tear through shattered concrete and tangled wire, while workers load everything from tins of beans to printers into shopping trolleys, under protection from Filipino soldiers. In the rest of the city, such work proceeds with simple hand tools. At the collapsed La Union Protestant church ten parishioners with crowbars pulled out five bodies on January 25th.

Haiti was already a failed state before the disaster। Now its government has to start from scratch. It has taken refuge in a police station. Responding to widespread criticism of his near invisibility since the disaster struck, Mr Préval says: “170,000 bodies were removed from the streets in 8 days. That means somebody is in charge. Working in an office is less glamorous than going to hospitals, but I prefer to work at alleviating the suffering of my people.”

The state has lost millions of records kept only on paper, like tax receipts and court filings, which now litter streets in the city centre। At the building that housed the foreign-ministry archives, workers are trying to salvage decades of folders and filing cabinets from the wreckage. Atop the pile on January 26th was a 1934 document restoring control of the Bank of Haiti to the government from the American bank that held it during a military occupation. More worrying still, more than 5,000 prisoners fled the country’s jails in the earthquake, and most remain at large.

Until now, international aid agencies have filled the void while the government has focused on disposing of the dead। Over $2 billion of relief funding has already been pledged. But officials estimate recovery could take a decade. And when the foreigners’ attention inevitably drifts to the next crisis, Haiti may be left trying to reconstruct unaided what it could never build properly in the first place.

Nevertheless, Marie Laurence Jocelyn Lassègue, the culture minister, is optimistic about Haiti’s chances of dragging itself back to its feet। “This time is different,” she says। “The national palace, the cathedrals and the ministries have been destroyed, and everyone has lost someone। In their name, we are obliged to rebuild। Otherwise, we’re not a real people.”

The Author

ALBERT B. CASUGA, a Philippine-born writer, lives in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, where he continues to write poetry, fiction, and criticism after his retirement from teaching and serving as an elected member of his region's school board. He was nominated to the Mississauga Arts Council Literary Awards in 2007. A graduate of the Royal and Pontifical University of St. Thomas (now University of Santo Tomas, Manila. Literature and English, magna cum laude), he taught English and Literature (Criticism, Theory, and Creative Writing) at the Philippines' De La Salle University and San Beda College. He has authored books of poetry, short stories, literary theory and criticism. He has won awards for his works in Canada, the U.S.A., and the Philippines. His latest work, A Theory of Echoes and Other Poems was published February 2009 by the University of Santo Tomas Publishing House. His fiction and poetry were published by online literary journals Asia Writes and Coastal Poems recently.
He was a Fellow at the 1972 Silliman University Writers Workshop, Philippines. As a journalist, he worked with the United Press International and wrote an art column for the defunct Philippines Herald.